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Personal  Reminiscences  of 

The  Caribbean  Sea  and 

The  Spanish  Main 


/ 


AT    LOS  ANGELES 


Personal  Reminiscences  of 

The  Caribbean  Sea  and 

The  Spanish  Main 

Written  by 
Francis  Russell  .Hart 

Boston  :  Nineteen  Hundred  and  Fourteen 


One  hundred  and  twenty-five  copies  have  been  printed 

for  Francis  Russell  Hart  by  The  De  Vinne  Press, 

in  June,  Nineteen  Hundred  and  Fourteen 


2.  VII 

-P 


To  the  Members  of  the 

Club  of  Odd  Volumes: 

These  scattered  notes  of  the  happenings 
oft  for  the  most  part,  some  twenty-odd 
years  ago,  'were  first  written  down  for  one 
of  the  monthly  meetings  of  the  Club. 

The  insistent  and  perhaps  ill-advised 

suggestion  of  one  of  the  members  that  the 

notes  be  continued  and  finally  printed  is 

the    reason  for  putting    into   permanent 

,      form    reminiscences    which    have,    it    is 

feared,  too  little  of  interest  to  merit  pres- 

ervation. 

This  little  volume  is  presented  to  you  in 
a  spirit  of  humility.  Tou  need  not  re  ad  it. 
If  it  meets  with  your  simple  acceptance 
it  will  have  fulfilled  its  destiny  and  the 
hopes  of 

THE  AUTHOR 

Boston,  June,  1914. 


H 


N 


Personal  Reminiscences  of 

the  Caribbean  Sea  and 

the  Spanish  Main 


>OR  us  of  the  New  World 
there  is  no  place  which 
so  fires  our  spirit  of  ad- 
venture and  romance  as 
the  Caribbean  Sea.  The 
very  names  "West  In- 
dies" and  "the  Spanish  Main"  give  to  us 
a  grateful  sense  of  sea-fights,  treasure- 
laden  ships  and  atrocities,  the  thoughts  of 
which  give  a  pleasant  tingle  to  our  blood. 
In  picturing  to  ourselves  palm-covered 
shores,  fever-infested  jungles,  and  hidden 
harbors  sheltering  the  black  flags  of 
swarthy  buccaneers  we  can  give  our  imag- 
inations free  scope,  with  assurance  that 
some  part  of  the  romantic  picture  is  true. 
The  brave  deeds,  even  the  frightful 
horrors,  have  a  delightful  quality  of  be- 
ing part  of  our  own  family  history,  even 
if  a  trifle  vicarious  and  remote.  The  geo- 
graphical nearness  of  these  waters  and 
lands,  the  important  influence  of  the 

struggles 


1J 

struggles  for  their  mastery  on  our  own 
early  development  as  a  nation,  and  our 
blood  kinship  with  the  Elizabethan  sea- 
men give  to  the  stirring  events  of  the 
Caribbean  a  definite  place  in  the  environ- 
ment which  has  controlled  our  own 
growth. 

Then  the  sense  of  nearness  in  point  of 
time  is  a  strong  fillip  to  our  fancy.  The 
happenings  which  set  aglow  the  swash- 
buckler spirit  dormant  in  all  men  are 
events  of  no  remote  time.  It  is  not  of  the 
red  and  white  bulls  of  Ireland  nor  of  the 
heroes  of  old  sagas  and  epics  that  we  read, 
but  records  of  stout-hearted  men  who 
lived  their  adventurous  and  mayhap  reck- 
less lives  so  near  our  own  day  that  it  may 
well  be  that  the  known  forebears  of  many 
of  us  here  were  made  fearful  or  glad- 
dened by  the  stories  of  their  doings— 
if,  indeed,  some  of  us  do  not  number  a 
few  sturdy  sea-rovers  in  our  own  family 
trees. 

The  conquering  march  of  trade  has  fol- 
lowed the  path  of  the  conquistadores,  but 
the  romance  has  not  gone.  Much  of  the 
past  remains,  not  only  in  the  white-walled 

fortresses 


fortresses  of  the  old  Spanish  towns  but  in 
the  spirit  of  the  peoples.  It  is  something 
akin  to  the  old  buccaneer  spirit  that 
causes  the  unrest  in  the  Latin-American 
countries.  The  waters  are  no  longer  the 
battle-ground  of  Europe.  The  sight  of  a 
vessel  hull  down  on  the  horizon  need  give 
the  tourist  no  fear  of  boarding-pikes  and 
plank-walking.  Many  of  the  links  with 
the  past  are  intimate,  however— the  ques- 
tion of  a  disputed  title  to  certain  lands 
held  to-day  by  an  American  corporation 
hangs  on  the  location  of  boundaries  of  a 
grant  of  land  to  the  Columbus  family 
four  centuries  ago.  It  matters  not  how 
often  one  goes,  the  charm,  the  half-mys- 
tery of  the  past  is  enthralling.  It  is,  I  be- 
lieve, some  forty-two  times  that  I  have 
sailed  by  the  little  island  believed  to  be 
the  first  landfall  of  Columbus,  and  never 
without  a  feeling  of  exhilaration,  a  pleas- 
ant stirring  of  imagination  and  stimula- 
tion of  the  adventurous  within  me. 

For  three  hundred  years  after  the  com- 
ing of  Columbus,  Europe  poured  its 
treasure-hunters  into  this  new  land.  For 
all  that  period,  and  without  cessation  up 

to 


111J 

to  this  very  day,  the  ships  from  the  Span- 
ish Main  have  carried  to  the  Old  World 
a  constant  stream  of  gold.  Of  later  years 
this  gold  has  been  more  honestly  won 
from  the  earth  than  in  the  earlier  days  of 
plunder,  and  the  never-ceasing  stream 
has  been  broadened  by  the  products  of  the 
fertile  lands— sugar,  coffee,  fruits,  rub- 
ber, tobacco.  To  tell  even  an  outline  of 
the  story  of  the  sea  fathers  of  the  Carib- 
bean and  the  struggles  of  three  centuries 
for  the  mastery  of  that  sea  would  take  too 
long.  Often  the  question  of  peace  or  war 
in  Europe  was  determined  by  the  sea- 
fights  in  the  Caribbean. 

Cortez,  Pizarro,  Balboa,  Drake,  Fro- 
bisher,  Dampier,  Hawkins,  Oxenham, 
Morgan,  du  Pointis,  Vernon,  de  Grasse, 
Rodney— it  was  men  like  these  whose 
deeds  have  given  us  the  stories  of  daring 
and  romance  which  have  made  these  seas 
and  shores  memorable,  and  bred  in  us  a 
fervent  spirit  of  adventure.  Touching 
lightly,  if  we  can,  for  the  better  satisfac- 
tion of  our  self-esteem,  on  the  part  which 
our  Colonial  forebears  bore  in  the  slave- 
trade  with  the  West  Indies,  we  find  a 

closer 


V 

closer  and  less  ignoble  link  in  the  great 
happenings  of  the  Spanish  Main  in  the 
siege  of  Cartagena  by  the  British  in  1741. 
A  body  of  some  thirty-six  hundred  Colo- 
nial troops,  including  five  companies 
from  Massachusetts,  were  joined  to  the 
expedition  under  Admiral  Vernon  at  Ja- 
maica in  January,  1741,  and  took  an  ac- 
tive part  in  the  disastrous  attempt  to 
capture  that  Spanish  stronghold. 

Your  Committee  has  seen  fit  to  suggest 
that  instead  of  telling  you  about  the  ro- 
mantic past,  and  the  bold  sailormen  and 
adventurous  soldiers  and  priests  who 
lived  in  that  past,  I  should  tell  you  some- 
what of  my  own  experiences  in  and  about 
the  Caribbean.  Perhaps  the  Committee 
realized  that  my  own  knowledge  of  the 
vastly  entertaining  historical  side  of  the 
Caribbean  Sea  is  superficial,  or  at  best, 
where  it  goes  deeper  than  the  surface, 
limited  to  certain  short,  disconnected 
periods  and  places. 

In  giving  you  a  few  personal  reminis- 
cences gained  from  some  years  of  resi- 
dence and  about  twenty-two  visits,  I  at 
least  have  the  advantage  that  even  the 

most 


VI 

most  learned  among  you  cannot  effec- 
tively take  issue  with  my  statements. 

The  natural  gateway  from  the  north  to 
the  Spanish  mainland  bordering  on  the 
Caribbean  Sea  is  through  the  Crooked 
Island  Passage  in  the  Bahamas.  The  one 
fact  known  as  to  the  first  landfall  and 
landing-place  of  Columbus  is  that  it  was 
one  of  the  islands  in  the  vicinity  of  the 
northern  entrance  to  this  passage.  The 
journal  of  Columbus  and  other  evidence 
relative  to  the  precise  island  are  suffi- 
ciently contradictory  to  leave  doubts  in 
the  mind  of  any  unprejudiced  investiga- 
tor as  to  which  of  these  islands  Columbus 
first  placed  foot  upon.  The  weight  of  the 
testimony,  however,  is  in  favor  of  Wat- 
lings  Island,  the  location  of  which,  and 
its  physical  characteristics,  are  in  accord 
with  more  of  the  reliable  recorded  data 
than  any  of  its  neighbors. 

It  was  almost  within  sight  of  this  island 
that,  some  twenty  years  ago,  I  experienced 
my  first  West  Indian  hurricane,  and  I 
wish  that  the  gift  were  mine  to  describe 
a  hurricane  at  sea  with  the  power  and  sub- 
limity with  which  Alexander  Hamilton, 

while 


Vlj 

while  yet  a  lad,  described  a  hurricane 
which  devastated  the  island  of  Nevis.  It 
was  a  scrap  of  a  boat  I  was  on,  the  steam- 
ship "Bowden"— many  of  you  may  have 
known  her  later,  as  she  became  the  "Bay 
State,"  the  hospital  ship  of  this  Common- 
wealth during  the  Spanish  War— a  vessel, 
if  I  remember  rightly,  of  not  over  six 
hundred  tons  gross  burthen.  No  ships  of 
a  size  and  build  like  those  of  Columbus 
could  have  lived  through  that  night,  and 
even  the  "Alvo"  of  the  Atlas  line,  a  vessel 
nearly  four  times  the  size  of  the  "Bow- 
den,"  was  lost  with  all  on  board  within  a 
comparatively  few  miles  of  us.  During 
the  early  afternoon  the  wind  had  com- 
pletely died  out,  this  in  itself  a  forebod- 
ing symptom  in  the  region  of  steady 
northeast  trades,  and  a  long,  heavy  swell 
from  the  southeast  had,  long  before  the 
sun  set,  begun  to  make  the  empty  ship  roll 
about  like  a  drunken  seaman.  To  those 
experienced  in  West  Indian  waters  the  un- 
natural calm  and  the  rising  seas  were  clear 
indications  of  an  approaching  hurricane, 
with  evidence  at  the  very  beginning  of 
the  first  sharp  onslaught  of  the  wind  that 

we 


V11J 

we  were  in  the  dangerous  semicircle  of 
the  storm.  As  you  all  know,  a  hurricane 
is  a  wind-storm  whirling  rapidly  in  a  not 
very  large  circle— the  circle  itself  moving 
at  a  slower  rate  along  a  somewhat  pre- 
scribed path.  If,  as  the  paths  of  the  hur- 
ricane and  ship  intersect,  the  ship  finds 
itself  so  located  in  the  circle  of  the  hurri- 
cane that  by  turning  tail  to  the  blasts  it 
can  follow  the  circle  and  by  so  doing  pass 
around  and  out  of  the  path  behind  the 
centre,  the  ship  is  said  to  be  in  the  safe 
semicircle.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the  ship 
is  in  the  other  half  of  the  disturbance  and 
runs  before  the  storm,  its  course  will  sim- 
ply lead  it  further  and  further  into  the 
thick  of  the  hurricane.  Under  these  con- 
ditions there  is  nothing  to  do  but  keep  the 
vessel's  nose  to  the  storm  and  trust  to  God, 
your  engines, — maybe  supplemented  by  a 
sea-anchor,— and  the  staunchness  of  the 
craft.  That  a  vessel  and  engines  built  by 
man  could  have  stood  the  turmoil  of  that 
night  I  would  not  have  believed  had  I 
not  experienced  it.  I  was  the  only  pas- 
senger. The  strongest  man  could  not 
have  held  himself  in  his  berth.  Either 

standing 


viiij 

standing  or  half  crouching,  holding 
tightly  on  to  something  or  lying  flat  on 
the  cabin  floor  or  deck  with  arms  and  legs 
braced,  was  all  that  prevented  broken 
bones. 

No  part  of  the  decks  was  free  from 
breaking  seas  and  swashing  water,— the 
noise  was  one  vast,  unearthly  shriek.  So 
awful  was  that  night  that  it  had  a  gran- 
deur all  its  own.  I  believe  at  such  a  time 
fear  would  be  abnormal.  Fear  is  more 
often  the  child  of  thought  than  of  experi- 
ence. If  your  whole  mind  is  occupied 
with  the  needs  of  the  moment  to  keep 
your  bones  whole,  you  have  no  time  for 
thoughts  of  graver  dangers.  The  awful 
sense  of  impending  calamity  was  with  us 
every  moment,— in  fact,  I  believe  no  man 
on  board  had  the  slightest  belief,  hardly 
hope,  that  we  would  ever  see  another  day, 
—  and  yet  that  little  group  of  men,  born 
in  some  half-dozen  parts  of  the  earth, 
stuck  grimly  at  their  posts  and  waited  for 
—they  knew  not  (and  who  knows?)  what. 
Three  times  that  night  two  of  the  officers 
and  the  one  passenger,  clinging  to  ropes 
in  the  lee  of  the  forward  deck-house,  were 

confident 


X 

confident,  so  far  as  it  was  possible  to  be 
confident  of  anything  when  the  blackness 
made  one  another  invisible,  that  the  stern- 
post  and  after  part  of  the  ship  had  given 
up  the  struggle  against  the  seas  and  rac- 
ing screw  and  that  the  ship  was  founder- 
ing. 

Yet  the  vessel  hung  together,  and  we 
told  each  other  in  hushed  tones  the  next 
day,  when  with  damaged  engines  and 
boilers  we  were  huddled  in  the  lee  of  the 
first  landfall  of  Columbus,  that  we  did  n't 
know— and  I  do  not  know  now— how  our 
ship  survived  that  night. 

Passing  on  through  this  course  marked 
out  for  us  by  the  great  Admiral  himself, 
we  can  discern  with  strong  glasses  the 
curve  of  the  coast  at  Nipe,  where  Colum- 
bus first  landed  in  Cuba  and  now  the  lo- 
cation of  a  great  Boston  sugar  company, 
the  Nipe  Bay  Company. 

Further  to  the  west  on  a  clear  day,  the 
island  of  Hayti  and  Cape  Tiburon,  the 
past  rendezvous  of  many  a  formidable 
fleet  and  scene  of  great  sea-fights,  can  be 
made  out  faintly  on  the  horizon. 

Rounding  Cape  Mayzi  on  the  eastern- 
most 


XI 

most  end  of  Cuba,  most  ships  head  for 
Jamaica,  but,  in  passing,  one  little  inci- 
dent during  the  Spanish  War,  relative  to 
the  lighthouse  on  Cape  Mayzi,  is  worth 
recording. 

One  of  the  smaller  chartered  boats  of 
the  then  Boston  (now  United)  Fruit 
Company  was  on  the  way  from  Jamaica 
to  Boston,  and  through  one  of  those  un- 
accountable actions  which  no  after-inves- 
tigation explains  ran  ashore  in  bright 
moonlight  some  miles  to  the  westward  of 
Mayzi,  on  the  south  side  of  the  island. 
The  water  is  hundreds  of  fathoms  deep 
right  up  to  the  shore,  which  is  rocky  and 
undercut  by  the  seas.  The  boat  was  im- 
movably wedged  on  a  piece  of  ledge, 
swinging  around  broadside  to  the  over- 
hanging shore  as  to  a  quay,  and  the  pas- 
sengers and  crew  in  due  course  landed 
comfortably  by  an  ordinary  gangplank  to 
the  shore. 

Although  the  ship  was  British,  the  pas- 
sengers were  chiefly  Americans,  and  the 
war  with  Spain  was  then  several  months 
old.  It  was  with  some  trepidation  that 
refuge  was  sought  at  the  lighthouse,  and 

a 


X1J 

a  request  made  that  one  of  the  company's 
ships  be  signalled.  Picture  to  yourself 
the  surprise  and  relief  when  it  was  found 
that  the  lighthouse-keeper  and  his  assis- 
tants had  no  knowledge  that  Spain  and 
the  United  States  were  at  war!  This  was 
indicative  of  that  lack  of  preparedness 
which  afterwards  became  so  evident. 

If  there  were  time,  I  would  like  to  tell 
you  something  of  the  old  Jamaica — not  the 
new  Jamaica  of  bananas,  hotels,  railroads, 
and  tourists,  but  the  Jamaica  of  those  days 
when  Sugar  was  king— a  king  so  power- 
ful and  rich  that  the  royal  privy  purse 
was  generously  depleted  to  help  fight  the 
great  Napoleon.  The  Jamaica  planters, 
as  a  fact,  contributed  a  fund  of  some  two 
hundred  thousand  pounds  as  a  voluntary 
offering  to  the  King  of  England  to  use  in 
the  wars  against  Napoleon  when  invasion 
of  England  was  threatened  and  feared.  I 
am  to-day  guardian  of  some  young  Eng- 
lish children  whose  scanty  income  is  ill- 
sufficing  for  their  education,  and  yet 
whose  great-grandfather  used  to  ride  into 
Kingston  from  his  plantations  with  a 
coach  and  four  with  outriders,  and  who 

contributed 


xiij 

contributed  personally  twenty  thousand 
pounds  of  that  gift  to  the  Crown.  In  this 
little  hint  of  the  experience  of  one  family 
can  be  found  an  epitome  of  the  island's 
history  for  the  last  hundred  years.  King 
Sugar  is  dead,  and  the  Banana  is  king. 
It  was  not,  of  course,  my  fortune  to  know 
the  island  in  those  rich  and  certainly  often 
riotous  old  days,  but  it  was  my  happiness 
to  know  it  before  the  panoply  of  the  past, 
somewhat  bedraggled  perhaps,  had  given 
full  place  to  the  new  regime.  I  knew  it 
when  family  life  on  the  big  plantations 
still  existed,  when  the  prestige  of  old  fam- 
ily names  was  greater  than  that  of  the 
great  banana  company,— for  which  at  the 
time  I  was  stringing  telephone  wires,— 
and  when  tourists  were  practically  un- 
known and  one  moved  about,  as  I  did,  on 
horseback  with  saddle-bags,  in  three- 
mule  mail-coaches,  or  in  more  preten- 
tious private  traps.  Frayed  at  the  edges 
as  were  the  trappings  of  former  great- 
ness, the  hospitality  and  good  cheer  were 
sincere  and  warm,  and  I  wish  it  were 
possible  to  take  you  to  that  dear,  open- 
hearted,  lovable  old  Jamaica. 

That 


Xlllj 

That  part  of  the  mainland  settled  and 
occupied  by  the  Spanish  was  called,  in 
distinction  from  the  islands  of  the  Carib- 
bean, the  Spanish  Main.  Roughly  it  can 
be  said  to  have  included  all  that  part  of 
the  South  American  and  Central  Ameri- 
can coasts  bordering  on  the  Caribbean 
Sea,  but  more  particularly  the  lands  ad- 
jacent to  the  shore  line  from  Lake  Mara- 
caibo  to  Yucatan  in  Central  America. 

The  important  strongholds  of  the  early 
Spaniards  on  this  mainland  were  Carta- 
gena, Nombre-de-Dios,  Porto  Bello  (near 
Nombre-de-Dios  and  which  supplanted 
that  place),  and,  of  lesser  importance, 
Chagres  and  Santa  Marta.  Of  these  Car- 
tagena was  far  the  most  formidable  and 
interesting.  Both  for  that  reason,  and 
because  I  lived  there  for  several  years, 
the  few  scattered  reminiscences  of  which  I 
have  made  notes  to  tell  you  have  as  their 
birthplace  the  Republic  of  Colombia. 

Cartagena  itself  is  too  interesting  a 
place  to  pass  by  without  a  word  as  to  its 
past— a  past  the  records  of  which  are 
singularly  present  in  the  almost  imperish- 
able masonry  of  its  buildings  and  fortifi- 
cations 


XV 

cations,  as  well  as  in  the  traditions  and 
habits  of  its  citizens. 

The  history  of  the  European  settle- 
ments in  Colombia  may  be  said  to  have 
begun  about  a  century  before  the  Pil- 
grims landed  at  Plymouth.  Columbus 
touched  at  points  on  the  Colombian  coast 
in  the  autumn  of  1502. 

The  conquistadores,  seeking  a  safe 
storehouse  for  their  treasure  and  a  ren- 
dezvous for  their  ships,  found  in  the  land- 
locked bay  of  Cartagena  a  place  with 
every  natural  condition  for  their  purpose. 
By  confining  the  only  navigable  entrance 
to  the  bay — a  body  of  water  about  two- 
thirds  the  size  of  Buzzards  Bay — to  the 
narrow  opening  at  Boca  Chica  and  pro- 
tecting that  entrance  by  two  massive  stone 
forts,  they  secured  one  of  the  finest  and 
best  protected  harbors  in  the  world.  The 
city  of  Cartagena  was  founded  in  1533, 
and  the  construction  of  its  fortifications, 
many  of  which  are  standing  in  practically 
perfect  condition  to-day,  began  immedi- 
ately. The  walls  were  begun  near  the 
close  of  the  sixteenth  century  and  finished 
just  before  the  end  of  the  seventeenth. 

Notwithstanding 


XVI 

Notwithstanding  that  there  was  no  lack 
of  slave  labor,  the  walls  are  reputed  to 
have  cost  so  many  millions  that  I  hesitate 
to  quote  the  Spanish  records,  which  give 
an  equivalent  of  over  $50,000,000  of  our 
money.  The  system  of  walls,  moats,  and 
bridges  was  designed  to  make  the  place 
impregnable  from  land  or  sea.  It  is  note- 
worthy, however,  that  those  early  Span- 
iards did  not  put  all  of  their  efforts  and 
labor  into  the  fortifications;  their  other 
works  were  designed  to  stand  for  cen- 
turies; the  cathedral,  begun  in  1538  and 
finished  a  half-century  before  the  first 
shelter  was  built  at  Plymouth,  stands  to- 
day, a  dignified  if  somewhat  sombre  me- 
morial of  that  close  association  of  the 
sword  and  the  cross  which  must  have 
been  confusing  to  the  minds  of  the  toiling 
slaves  who  worked  on  its  building.  The 
old  Inquisition  Building,  now  the  private 
residence  of  Colombian  friends  of  mine, 
is  a  grim  reminder  of  how  near  to  our 
own  time  these  old  days  were. 

The  convent  of  Santo  Domingo,  built 
in  1559  and  interesting  in  design,  is  in  a 
perfect  state  of  preservation,  and  that  of 

the 


XV1J 

the  Franciscan  fathers,  built  in  1575,  while 
in  a  less  perfect  condition,  is  picturesque 
as  seen  from  my  old  office  windows  across 
the  Plaza  de  la  Independencia. 

In  1586  the  walls  and  fortifications 
were  not  wholly  completed,  and  Sir  Fran- 
cis Drake  captured  the  place,  accepting 
for  its  release  a  large  ransom.  A  little  less 
than  a  century  later,  Admiral  du  Pointis, 
with  a  French  fleet  supplemented  by  a 
fleet  of  buccaneers  from  Hayti,  again 
forced  the  payment  of  a  ransom,  and  in 
1741  the  British  fleet  under  Admiral  Ver- 
non,  with  many  troops  on  board,  took  the 
place  after  a  long  siege. 

This  is  the  expedition  to  which  I  al- 
luded and  in  which  American  Colonial 
troops  were  employed.  The  victory  was, 
however,  only  partial,  and  accompanied 
by  such  heavy  losses  that  it  was  almost 
more  serious  than  a  defeat. 

During  the  first  year  of  my  residence 
at  Cartagena  I  lived  just  under  the 
shadow  of  the  fortress  of  San  Lazaro, 
which  never  surrendered  and  where  one 
of  the  bravest  and  bloodiest  battles  of  this 
continent  was  fought. 

Colombia 


XVllj 

Colombia  freed  herself,  under  the  lead- 
ership of  Bolivar,  from  Spain  in  1819, 
and  twice  during  the  war  of  indepen- 
dence Cartagena  was  besieged,— in  fact, 
in  the  too  frequent  political  troubles  of 
Colombia  since  the  day  of  her  indepen- 
dence the  extraordinary  strength  of  Car- 
tagena to  withstand  ordinary  infantry 
attacks  has  made  it  a  city  to  be  besieged 
rather  than  taken  by  storm. 

Traces  of  the  old  road  to  the  Magda- 
lena  River  and  the  interior  still  remain— 
the  old  road  down  which  came  whip- 
driven  bands  of  Indians  carrying  the 
looted  treasure  from  the  mountains  and 
river  valleys  of  the  mysterious  back  land 
whence  came  always  the  alluring  tales  of 
El  Dorado.  A  few  notes  relative  to  that 
wonderful  golden  country — that  ignis 
fatuus  of  the  conquistador es — and  some 
researches  in  a  small  way  that  in  associa- 
tion with  others  I  have  made,  may  be  of 
some  interest. 

In  proportion  to  the  needs  of  the  peo- 
ple for  a  ductile  metal,  gold  appears 
to  have  been  abundant  and  in  common 
use  among  the  native  tribes  in  nearly 

all 


XV111J 

all  of  the  early  settled  places  on  the  main- 
land. 

For  the  practical  uses  of  a  primitive 
people  and  for  their  decoration  the  easily 
worked  metal,  found  without  excessive 
labor  in  a  pure  state  in  the  river  beds,  was 
adapted  by  crude  tools  to  their  needs.  It 
was  not  strange  that  the  prodigal  use  of 
the  metal  awakened  in  the  early  discover- 
ers and  settlers  a  lust  for  conquest  and  a 
belief  in  the  New  World  as  an  inexhaus- 
tible source  of  treasure.  Herrera  tells  of 
the  gift,  in  1518,  to  Juan  de  Grijalva  by 
the  cacique  of  Tabasco,  of  a  complete 
suit  of  gold  armor,  made  and  fitted  as  if 
it  had  been  made  of  steel. 

Stories  reached  the  coast  of  a  wonder- 
ful country  back  in  the  mountains  with  a 
great  and  marvellous  city  fairly  ablaze 
with  glittering  gold  and  priceless  gems. 
The  search  for  El  Dorado  and  the  great 
city  of  Manoa,  on  the  banks  of  a  mythical 
inland  sea,  began.  The  imagination  per- 
mitted no  limit  to  the  extravagant  won- 
ders of  this  place :  its  houses  were  covered 
with  golden  tiles  and  filled  with  statues 
of  pure  gold,  while  its  king  sat  on  a 

throne 


XX 

throne  of  solid  gold.  So  definite  were 
these  beliefs  that  on  nearly  all  sixteenth 
century  maps  the  lake  called  Parima  is 
shown.  The  imaginative  and  falsifying 
explorer  is  not  a  phenomenon  of  our  day 
only.  In  1534  one  Juan  Martinez  re- 
ported that  he  had  spent  seven  months  in 
Manoa.  How  colossal  a  lie  his  own  story 
was,  it  is  now  impossible  to  tell,  but  by 
the  time  it  had  been  repeated  by  the  ex- 
cited and  credulous  tongues  of  the  monks 
who  heard  his  dying  tale,  the  story  was 
one  to  inflame  the  cupidity  of  the  adven- 
turous of  all  nations.  The  expedition  of 
Sir  Walter  Raleigh  in  1595,  by  way  of 
the  Orinoco,  although  a  complete  failure, 
as  of  course  it  had  to  be,  was  reported  by 
him  to  have  confirmed  the  tales.  The 
location  of  El  Dorado,  although  some- 
what uncertain  in  the  descriptions  gener- 
ally given,  fixed  its  position  at  the  head 
waters  of  one  or  the  other  of  the  great 
rivers.  It  was  generally  believed  that  up 
in  the  mountains,  dimly  seen  by  those 
who  ventured  inland,  there  existed  a  great 
body  of  auriferous  earth  from  which  the 
mysterious  inland  lake,  extracting  the 

gold, 


XXI 

gold,  fed  its  waters  to  the  Orinoco  and 
other  rivers  entering  the  Caribbean. 
Humboldt  made  a  careful  study  of  the 
geography,  facts,  and  traditions  respect- 
ing £1  Dorado,  and  it  was  not  until  his 
time  that  the  belief  in  its  actual  existence 
was  ended. 

In  1536  Nicolas  Federmann  searched 
the  upper  waters  of  the  Magdalena,  and 
Geronimo  de  Ortal  tried  to  discover  on 
the  banks  of  the  Meta  the  reputed  Casa 
del  Sol,  or  Temple  of  the  Sun. 

In  the  light  of  certain  explorations  of 
Lake  Guatavita  in  Colombia,  it  is  inter- 
esting to  note  that  Humboldt,  in  an  en- 
deavor to  give  due  weight  to  the  possible 
facts  that  may  have  given  basis  for  the 
stories  of  El  Dorado,  tells  of  an  inland 
lake,  which  he  believes  to  have  been  Gua- 
tavita, where  the  native  great  men,  their 
bodies  covered  with  powdered  gold, 
bathed  in  the  waters,  and  where  the  In- 
dians reported  that  gold  dust  and  golden 
vessels  were  thrown  into  the  lake  as  a 
sacrifice  to  the  Adoratorio  de  Guatavita. 

The  Padre  Fray  Pedro  Simon  went  to 
teach  in  the  Franciscan  convent  at  Bo- 
gota 


XXlj 

gota  in  1604,  and  for  nearly  twenty  years 
devoted  himself  to  compiling  historical 
records.  He  describes  the  lake,  and  the 
offerings,  with  prescribed  ceremonies,  of 
gold,  jewelry,  emeralds,  and  other  things. 
In  addition  to  the  usual  offerings  in  the 
way  of  worship  he  relates  that  there  were 
men  still  alive  who  had  witnessed  the 
burial  of  some  caciques  who  had  ordered 
their  bodies  and  wealth  thrown  into  the 
lake,  and  that  when  it  was  rumored  that 
strange  bearded  men  had  entered  the 
country  searching  for  gold,  many  Indians 
brought  their  hoarded  treasures  and  of- 
fered them  as  a  sacrifice  in  the  lake.  Some 
of  these  offerings  were  in  such  quantities 
that  the  cacique  of  the  village  of  Simijaca 
is  said  to  have  alone  thrown  into  the  lake 
forty  loads  of  gold  of  one  quintal  each, 
requiring  to  be  carried  by  forty  Indians 
from  his  village. 

The  cacique  of  Guatavita  is  supposed 
to  have  been,  before  the  conquest  by  the 
Spaniards,  a  powerful  ruler  controlling  a 
large  and  populous  territory,  and  keep- 
ing up  an  army  of  many  thousand  war- 
riors. The  lake  of  Guatavita  is  some  nine 

to 


Treasure  from  El  Dorado 
[Theo.  de  Bry,  Pars  vi.,  1596] 


xxnj 

to  ten  thousand  feet  above  the  sea,  and 
formed  on  the  top  of  one  of  the  moun- 
tains of  the  Colombian  Andes. 

The  cacique  appears  to  have  been  also 
a  sort  of  head  priest  of  the  Chibchas. 
Nearly  all  of  the  old  chroniclers  give  de- 
scriptions of  the  periodical  offerings  and 
other  rites  observed  to  placate  the  pro- 
tecting deity  who  was  supposed  to  live  in 
the  lake.  Grand  processions  of  the  ca- 
cique's subjects,  carrying  gold  offerings, 
went  up  the  mountain,  and  when  gathered 
on  the  banks  of  the  lake  the  cacique  and 
his  head  man,  embarking  in  canoes,  went 
to  the  exact  centre  of  the  lake.  There  the 
cacique,  fully  anointed  in  a  paste  of  pow- 
dered gold,  plunged  into  the  lake,  while 
from  about  its  banks  the  people  shouted 
and  threw  far  out  into  the  waters  their 
offerings  of  gold,  emeralds,  and  other 
valuable  gifts.  It  well  may  be  that  the 
tales  of  the  Golden  Man  bathing  in  the 
lake  are  the  foundation  for  the  name  El 
Dorado,  afterwards  applied  to  the  whole 
vicinity.  Prisoners  taken  by  the  Span- 
iards from  time  to  time,  to  secure  good 
treatment  or  release  told  of  the  sacred 

lake 


XXlllj 

lake  in  the  bottom  of  which  could  be 
found  immeasurable  wealth.  The  Span- 
iards, in  fact,  made  various  attempts  to 
drain  the  lake.  Recent  photographs 
show  the  deep  cut  in  the  further  side  of 
the  surrounding  hills  left  by  the  last 
Spanish  attempt  to  reach  the  treasures  by 
drainage.  From  time  to  time,  by  the  use 
of  sounding  leads  or  by  the  washing  of 
mud  scraped  from  the  banks,  small  gold 
images  and  emeralds  have  been  found.  In 
1897  a  company  of  Colombians  started 
anew  the  work  of  drainage— an  inconve- 
nient matter  on  account  of  the  surround- 
ing hills.  In  1899  a  friend  of  mine,  an 
Englishman,  acquired,  through  a  con- 
tract, the  right  on  profit-sharing  terms  to 
complete  the  drainage  of  the  lake. 

A  number  of  his  friends,  some  attracted 
by  the  historical  and  archaeological  inter- 
est of  the  quest,  and  others  by  the  hope  of 
extraordinary  profits,  joined  in  furnish- 
ing the  requisite  funds  for  the  engineer- 
ing work  necessary.  This  work,  unfortu- 
nately delayed  several  years  by  civil  war 
in  Colombia  and  by  other  causes,  was  in 
effect  completed  a  few  years  ago  by  a 

somewhat 


XXV 

somewhat  ingenious  plan.  A  horizontal 
tunnel  was  bored  through  one  of  the  side 
hills  to  a  point  below,  but  a  little  to  one 
side  of,  the  edge  of  the  lake.  A  vertical 
shaft  was  then  sunk,  and,  when  com- 
pleted, so  connected  with  the  lake  that  the 
latter  was  drained  in  much  the  same  way 
as  the  water  is  emptied  from  a  bath-tub. 
Great  difficulty  has  been  found,  however, 
in  handling  the  mud  and  sand  at  the  bot- 
tom. Unfortunately,  the  place  appears 
to  be  afflicted  with  prolonged  droughts, 
and  during  the  last  few  years  there  has 
been  practically  no  rainfall  at  all.  So 
soon  as  the  water  had  been  drained  off, 
and  before  the  completion  of  any  proper 
system  of  working  the  mud,  the  surface 
of  the  bottom  was  baked  by  the  sun  into  a 
hard  and  solid  mass  below  which  the 
mud  is  in  a  semi-liquid  state.  Being  han- 
dicapped by  lack  of  funds,  the  work  has 
made  little  progress  latterly,  but  many 
beautiful  gold  ornaments  have  been 
found,  many  emeralds,  quantities  of 
beads,  and  much  old  pottery.  The  indi- 
cations are  that  these  were  all  from  the 
mud  near  the  shore,  and  that  no  part  of 

the 


XXVI 

the  articles  found  have  come  from  the 
centre,  where  the  bulk  of  such  things 
would  presumably  have  drifted. 

Within  the  last  year  additional  funds 
have  been  subscribed  to  permit  the 
proper  working  of  the  mud  in  the  centre, 
which  can  only  be  done  with  adequate 
washing  machinery  and  a  supply  of 
water. 

Enough  has  already  been  found,  how- 
ever, to  establish  the  truth  of  some  portion 
of  the  traditions  regarding  the  lake.  We 
may,  in  fact,  have  found  the  very  birthplace 
of  that  alluring  story  of  El  Dorado  which 
drew  to  their  death  many  brave  souls,  and 
was  largely  responsible  for  the  vigor  of 
the  struggles  for  the  mastery  of  the  New 
World. 

I  will  not  weary  you  with  an  account  of 
the  construction  and  operation  of  the  Car- 
tagena Railroad  and  its  allied  undertak- 
ings. It  is  enough  to  say  that  the  purpose 
of  the  railroad  was  to  connect  the  harbor 
of  Cartagena  with  the  Magdalena  River, 
the  great  commercial  highway  of  Colom- 
bia, and  incidentally  to  develop  the  coun- 
try along  its  route.  Misconceptions  of 

various 


XXVlj 

various  kinds  had  encouraged  the  pro- 
moters to  expect  more  traffic  and  a  more 
rapid  development  of  contributory  enter- 
prises than  the  facts  justified.  Those  who 
took  over  the  direction  of  the  company's 
affairs  even  before  the  completion  of  the 
first  section  of  the  railroad  were  not  con- 
cerned in  the  conception  of  the  under- 
taking. It  was  at  that  time  that  I  became 
connected  with  the  company  as  its  general 
manager  in  Colombia.  In  addition  to 
the  railroad,  the  company  operated  a  line 
of  steamboats  on  the  Magdalena  River, 
which  is  navigable  by  boats  of  the  Missis- 
sippi River  type  to  the  rapids  at  Honda, 
nearly  six  hundred  miles  from  the  coast; 
above  the  rapids,  around  which  a  line  of 
railroad  carries  the  cargo  and  passengers, 
smaller  boats  are  worked  on  the  river  for 
a  distance  of  some  one  hundred  and  fifty 
miles,  connecting  now— but  not  then— 
with  the  Girardot  Railway  to  Bogota. 

The  voyages  up  and  down  the  river 
were  always  a  delight  to  me,  and  to  those 
of  you  who  are  not  too  fussy  about  your 
food  and  some  of  the  minor  comforts  of 
travelling  I  can  suggest  no  more  interest- 
ing 


XXVllj  4 

ing  and  comfortable  way  of  getting  into 
the  heart  of  a  South  American  country. 
One  of  the  chief  delights  to  me,  however, 
was  always  the  rapids  at  Honda,  and  the 
excitement  connected  with  getting  our 
upper-river  boats  either  up  or  down  the 
rapids.  The  procedure  was  not  unlike 
that  of  which  you  have  seen  pictures 
taken  on  the  Nile.  The  boat  is  kept  off 
from  the  rocky  shore  by  long  poles  or 
spars  held  somewhat  uncertainly  by  ten 
or  more  men  each  and  driven  forward  by 
its  own  stern  paddle-wheel  supplemented 
by  ropes  fastened  to  trees  on  the  shore  and 
pulled  by  strong  donkey-engines  in  the 
fore  part  of  the  boat.  The  passage  up  the 
rapids  takes  about  five  hours;  the  return 
passage,  when  required  for  repairs  or 
other  exigencies,  from  three  to  five  min- 
utes. The  fact  that  the  insurance  did  not 
attach  from  a  certain  point  below  to  an- 
other point  above  the  rapids  used  to  give 
an  added  zest  to  the  operation. 

You  must  forgive  me  if  my  recollec- 
tions are  somewhat  scattering  and  discon- 
nected. I  am  jotting  down  incidents  as 
they  occur  to  me. 

The 


XXV111J 

The  railroad  from  Cartagena  leads  into 
the  Turbaco  Hills,  as  they  are  called,  fol- 
lowing the  old  Spanish  path  to  the  river, 
and  reaches  at  an  elevation  of  about  six 
hundred  feet,  some  fifteen  miles  from  the 
shore,  the  town  of  Turbaco,— a  little  vil- 
lage, by  the  way,  which  had  some  distinc- 
tion at  one  time,  as  it  was  here  that  Gen- 
eral Santa  Anna  took  refuge  when  forced 
to  flee  from  Mexico.  He  built  a  large, 
comfortable  house,  and  appears  to  have 
enjoyed,  for  some  time  at  any  rate,  the 
comforts  which  could  be  purchased  with 
the  price  paid  by  America.  On  the  slope 
of  the  Turbaco  Hills  towards  the  sea  I 
had  for  my  amusement  a  small  portrero, 
or  cattle  ranch,  of  about  seven  hundred 
and  fifty  acres,  and  the  primitive  little 
village  of  Turbaco  and  its  people  became 
well  known  to  me.  I  remember  very  well 
one  little  incident  from  which  Judge  Par- 
menter,  our  secretary,  should  draw  in- 
spiration. I  had  come  up  from  Carta- 
gena on  the  afternoon  train  to  spend  the 
night  at  my  bungalow  on  the  portrero, 
and  on  arrival  had  been  met  by  old  Mary, 
my  black  Jamaica  washerwoman,  her 

shiny 


XXX 

shiny  ebony  face  streaked  with  tears.  Old 
as  she  herself  was,  she  had  just  returned 
from  a  trip  to  Jamaica,  where  she  had 
gone  to  make  a  shroud  in  which  her 
mother  was  in  due  course  to  be  buried,— 
not  that  her  mother  was  dead,  but  that  the 
long  trip  to  prepare  her  for  her  last  voy- 
age was  an  act  of  daughterly  devotion 
which  gave  great  comfort  to  the  aged 
black  mammy  in  Jamaica.  On  her  return 
from  this  cheerful  errand,  and  the  family 
fetes  connected  therewith,  she  had 
brought  with  her  a  goose  and  gander, 
birds  so  rare  in  the  fowl  yards  of  Carta- 
gena that  she  had  incurred  the  envy  of 
our  previously  friendly  neighbors.  The 
cause  of  the  tears  was  soon  related:  The 
goose  had  been  stolen,  and  Mary  and  the 
overseer,  a  tall  Jamaica  negro  who  had 
seen  army  service  on  the  Gold  Coast, 
more  than  suspected  a  half-breed  woman 
of  Turbaco  called  Manuela.  The  story 
told,  and  the  magnitude  of  the  tragedy 
realized,  I  started  at  once  on  horseback 
with  Fraser,  the  overseer,  for  Turbaco, 
and  called  on  my  friend  the  alcalde. 
Unhappily,  Manuela  was  of  the  family 

of 


XXXI 

of  some  member  of  the  household  of  the 
alcalde,  and  for  a  brief  moment  I  thought 
the  wheels  of  justice  had  small  chance  of 
turning  in  a  direction  favorable  to  our 
quest.  But  our  arguments  prevailed,  and 
a  search-warrant,  accompanied  by  two 
peons  dignified  by  policemen's  badges, 
issued  from  the  Alcaldia. 

The  search  of  Manuela's  wattled  and 
thatched  cottage  and  outbuildings  not 
only  brought  to  light  the  goose,  but  vari- 
ous small  articles  branded  with  the  name 
of  the  railway  company.  As  the  alcalde 
pointed  out,  however,  the  warrant  gave 
the  right  to  search  for  the  goose  only,  and 
nothing  else  could  in  honor  be  seen  or 
noted. 

Back  in  the  dark  and  smoky  Alcaldia 
the  investigation  ended  with  the  return  of 
the  goose  to  Fraser.  My  overseer,  how- 
ever, had  not  the  rewards  which  a  sense 
of  humor  had  given  me  in  this  tame  goose 
chase,  and  protested  with  some  anger 
when  the  alcalde  was  dismissing  Manuela 
without  even  a  reprimand.  He  insistently 
demanded  that  the  woman  be  punished. 

"What!"  said  the  alcalde.  "Is  it  not 

enough 


XXXlj 

enough  that  the  poor  woman  has  to  give 
back  the  goose,  after  all  her  trouble?" 

It  was  in  this  same  interesting  little  vil- 
lage that  on  one  quiet  Sunday,  just  as  the 
people  were  leaving  the  picturesque  old 
Spanish  church  on  one  side  of  the  plaza, 
a  shower  of  small  aerolites,  accompanied 
by  a  slight  detonation,  fell  on  the  very 
heads  and  at  the  feet  of  the  congregation. 
It  was  undeniably  a  miracle,  and  those 
little  pieces  of  heaven-born  stones  are  still 
being  worn  as  amulets  by  children  in 
Turbaco,  not  only  as  the  sole  article  of 
apparel,  but  also,  in  accordance  with  cus- 
tom, as  the  sole  precaution  against  all 
dangers  of  accident  or  disease.  The  fact 
that  at  the  same  moment  the  miracle  oc- 
curred an  unusually  large  blasting  explo- 
sion, postponed  for  safety  until  Sunday 
had  kept  people  from  the  neighborhood, 
had  taken  place  in  one  of  the  railway  rock 
cuts  some  miles  away,  would  probably, 
even  if  known,  not  have  lessened  the  effi- 
cacy of  the  amulets. 

It  must  have  been  before  the  town  was 
protected  by  this  wholesale  distribution 
of  evil-defeating  charms  that  a  great  fire 

took 


XXX11J 

took  place  there,  wiping  out  about  a  quar- 
ter of  its  area  and  destroying  some  sev- 
enty-five or  one  hundred  of  the  quick- 
burning  thatched  houses.  One  impression 
of  that  fire  is  vividly  in  my  mind :  I  had 
been  working  with  all  the  railway  em- 
ployees I  could  muster,  helping  tear 
down  and  drag  away  a  group  of  houses, 
outbuildings,  and  fences  to  stop  the 
spread  of  the  fire  in  one  direction,  and 
started  down  a  small  side  street  to  the  rail- 
way storehouse  for  a  new  supply  of  ma- 
chetes, and  found  in  the  middle  of  the  road 
a  whole  family  of  peons  grouped  about 
all  of  their  household  goods,  on  the  top  of 
which  was  a  chromo  print  of  their  patron 
saint.  The  man  was  first  prayerfully  en- 
treating the  saint  to  preserve  his  house 
from  the  flames,  and  then  threatening  him 
if  he  failed  to  do  so.  No  otner  steps  were 
being  taken  to  keep  the  fire  away.  It  was 
too  interesting  a  group  to  leave,  but  with 
a  few  words  of  suggestion  as  to  ways  in 
which  he  and  his  family  might  aid  the 
saint  in  protecting  the  house,  I  passed  on. 
Returning  shortly  afterwards,  just  as 
the  flames  caught  the  house  and  it  burnt 

rapidly 


XXXlllj 

rapidly  with  the  sudden  rush  and  roar 
with  which  these  empty  wattle  and  thatch 
huts  always  burn,  I  was  just  in  time  to  see 
the  owner  hurl  the  portrait  of  his  hitherto 
respected  patron  saint  into  the  midst  of 
the  flames,  with  imprecations  which  only 
my  failure  to  understand  his  rapid  and 
angry  Spanish  prevents  my  repeating  to 
you.  As  the  prefect  of  the  province  after- 
wards told  me  in  confidence,  saints  are  all 
very  well  in  their  way,  but  they  are 
entitled  to  the  reasonable  aid  of  the  ordi- 
nary human  agencies.  Owing  to  its  mas- 
sive masonry  construction  and  the  exclu- 
sive use  of  tiled  roofs,  the  city  of 
Cartagena  has  had  no  serious  fires,  nor  is 
it  likely  to  have. 

Perhaps  one  of  the  strangest  things 
about  all  of  these  countries  of  northern 
South  America  and  of  Central  America  is 
the  fact  that  the  almost  aboriginal  life  of 
the  country  knocks  so  closely  at  the  gates 
of  cities  that  have  been  civilized  for  cen- 
turies. Cartagena,  for  example,  settled 
nearly  four  centuries  ago,  with  its  fine 
buildings,  good  streets,  electric  lights, 
ice-plant,  clubs,  and  cafes,  is  hardly  more 

than 


XXXV 

than  a  rifle-shot  from  regions  which  must 
look  to-day  not  far  different  from  the  time 
when  Drake  landed  there.  Except  in  one 
direction,  no  road  on  which  a  wheeled 
vehicle  can  travel  extends  for  more  than 
three  miles  from  the  centre  of  the  city,  the 
one  exception  being  a  privately  owned 
narrow  roadway  along  the  harbor's  edge 
to  the  country  house  of  one  of  the  pros- 
perous merchants. 

For  amusement  I  once  drove,  during 
the  dry  season,  a  light  two-wheeled  cart 
up  to  my  portrero  of  Santa  Ysabel,  of 
which  I  have  spoken,  a  distance  of  ten 
miles.  This  was  along  the  Camina  Real, 
the  main  path  to  the  interior,  and  even  so 
it  required  lifting  the  cart  over  many 
places,  and  overcoming  such  difficulties 
that  even  my  man  preferred  to  send  the 
cart  back  on  a  railway  flat-car. 

What  is  true  of  the  outward  evidences 
of  civilization  is  to  a  large  extent  true  of 
the  habits  and  intellectual  life  of  the 
people. 

In  the  large  cities  the  better  class  of 
people  are  intelligent  and  cultured.  The 
standards  of  education  are  high.  Their 

literary 


XXXVI 

literary  taste,  their  knowledge  of  the 
world's  history  and  the  current  events  of 
politics,  books  and  music  are  above  the 
average  of  similar  communities  in  coun- 
tries which,  on  the  whole,  are  far  more 
developed.  Yet  within  less  than  fifty 
miles  are  villages  of  five  to  ten  thousand 
people  who  live  exactly  as  they  have  lived 
for  hundreds  of  years.  Men  of  promi- 
nence in  these  villages,  landowners,  had 
vocabularies  so  limited  that  no  words 
were  known  to  them  to  explain  the  sim- 
plest thing  regarding  a  locomotive  until 
its  actual  presence  made  it  possible.  The 
citizens  of  the  town  of  Soplaviento  ad- 
dressed a  petition  to  the  government  ask- 
ing that  the  railway  be  not  permitted  to 
have  a  station  at  their  town,  because,  it 
being  on  the  further  side  of  a  river  over 
which  we  had  constructed  a  steel  bridge, 
they  knew  that  no  bridge  could  be  built 
over  which  it  would  be  safe  for  trains 
with  the  added  weight  of  passengers  and 
freight  to  pass.  They  naively  remarked 
in  the  petition  that  their  less  well  in- 
formed fellow-citizens  might  be  tempted, 
in  their  ignorance,  to  board  the  train  on 

their 


XXXVlj 

their  side  of  the  river  if  the  train  stopped 
there ! 

The  railways  have  changed  many 
things,  but  those  pioneer  days  of  their 
construction  were  in  many  ways  interest- 
ing, as  were  the  people,  not  only  those  in- 
digenous to  the  country,  but  those  who 
came  there — often,  it  must  be  confessed, 
for  the  good  of  the  countries  they  had  left. 
One  of  my  dearest  friends  (and  I  learned 
to  love  him  sincerely)  was  the  dear  old 
Bishop  of  Cartagena,  Monsignor  Biffi,  a 
venerable  Italian,  with  a  long  white 
beard,  finely  educated,  but  with  a  heart  as 
simple  and  loving  as  the  cure  in  the  open- 
ing chapters  of  "Les  Miserables."  In  his 
flowing,  purple  robes,  with  the  long  chain 
and  cross  hanging  below  his  white  beard, 
and  his  gentle,  stately  walk,  he  often  came 
to  dine  with  me.  With  his  capacity  to 
talk  perfectly  in  Italian,  Spanish,  Eng- 
lish, French,  German,  Persian,  and  I 
know  not  how  many  more  tongues,  he  was 
an  invaluable  guest  at  the  sort  of  polyglot 
dinners  I  used  to  give.  Of  one  rare  fac- 
ulty he  had  the  secret,  which  I  never  dis- 
covered: he  always  instinctively  knew 

whether 


XXXVllj 

whether  the  person  presented  to  him  was 
of  his  church  or  not.  If  of  the  Catholic 
faith,  his  hand  always  went  forward, 
palm  down,  and  it  was  kissed;  if  not  of 
that  church,  his  hand  always  went  out 
ready  for  kindly  and  welcoming  grasp  in 
the  ordinary  fashion. 

Although  combining  in  himself  the  at- 
tributes for  the  priesthood  with  those  of  a 
cultivated  gentleman  and  man  of  the 
world,  Monsignor  Biffi  had  all  the  charm 
which  came  from  an  unaffectedly  simple 
nature.  It  was  this  quality  of  simplicity 
that  made  it  possible  for  him  to  adapt  his 
teachings  to  the  wholly  illiterate  peas- 
antry. 

If  church  customs  almost  medieval  in 
character  helped  hold  the  ignorant  to  a 
faith  in  something,  let  these  customs  be 
left  undisturbed,  he  said,  rather  than  that 
their  faith  should  be  weakened. 

I  remember  an  incident  illustrating 
both  the  antiquity  of  the  customs  at  Car- 
tagena, and  Monsignor  Biffi's  anxiety  to 
do  nothing  to  shock  the  reverence  of  the 
people  for  any  of  the  forms  which  con- 
nected the  church  with  their  daily  lives. 

During 


xxxviiij 

During  Holy  Week,  from  Thursday 
morning  until  the  firing  of  a  gun  from  one 
of  the  wall  bastions  on  Easter  forenoon, 
any  labor  not  absolutely  necessary  is 
strictly  prohibited  in  Cartagena.  No  car- 
riages can  be  used.  A  man  on  horseback 
is  stopped  at  the  gates  and  ordered  to  dis- 
mount and  lead  his  animal.  All  the  ordi- 
nary functions  of  city  life,  including 
marketing  and  other  almost  necessary 
occupations,  are  prohibited. 

Exceptions  to  these  rules  are  made  only 
when,  on  request,  the  bishop  grants  a  writ- 
ten "permit,"  a  privilege  accorded  but 
sparingly  in  cases  of  illness  or  other  seri- 
ous condition. 

Our  problem  was  how  to  operate  the 
railway  during  the  period.  The  trains 
had  taken  the  place  of  the  older  forms  of 
reaching  the  city  by  horse  and  mule,  and 
yet,  unlike  the  latter,  the  trains  could  not 
stop  outside  the  city  limits.  The  engine- 
houses,  shops,  water-tanks,  and  all  the  nec- 
essary terminal  equipment,  were  within 
the  city. 

Somewhere  I  have  preserved  the  orig- 
inal permit  given  to  work  the  trains  dur- 
ing 


xl 

ing  the  proscribed  period.  Translated,  it 
reads  something  as  follows:  "Permission 
is  hereby  given  the  Railway  Company  to 
operate  its  trains,  as  is  the  custom  in 
European  countries,  provided  they  are 
moved  as  nearly  as  possible  without  noise 
and  at  the  speed  of  a  man  walking,  and 
that  the  whistles  be  not  blown  nor  the 
bells  permitted  to  ring  except  to  avoid 
accident." 

The  italicized  words  served  as  an  ex- 
pedient explanation— almost  apology— 
to  those  who  might  see  the  permit  and  be 
shocked  at  its  liberality. 

The  failure  of  the  French  Canal  Com- 
pany had  left  stranded  in  that  part  of  the 
world  many  adventurers  and  some  few 
honest  men.  Some  of  both  drifted  into 
our  service.  One  distinguished  but  some- 
what worn  and  wan-looking  Italian  came 
one  day  looking  for  any  sort  of  a  job.  I 
sent  him  as  camp  master  in  charge  of  a 
gang  of  laborers  at  work  on  the  embank- 
ments near  that  river  the  crossing  of 
which  so  distressed  the  people  of  Sopla- 
viento.  He  did  his  work  well,  but  I  did 
not  see  him  again  for  some  time.  Mr.  T. 

Jefferson 


xli 

Jefferson  Coolidge,  just  then  returned 
from  his  mission  to  France,  made  me  a 
visit,  and  at  the  same  time  Mr.  Gordon 
Abbott,  who  had  come  to  Cartagena  to 
see,  among  other  things,  if  I  were  a  fit 
person  to  manage  the  property,  was  also 
with  me.  These  two,  with  an  appropriate 
party  equipment,  went  over  the  line  on 
horseback,  a  journey  of  several  days,  and 
were  astonished  to  find  in  this  camp  mas- 
ter, at  the  most  forsaken-looking  native 
kraal  on  the  whole  line,  an  Italian  gentle- 
man of  courtly  manners,  high  breeding, 
and  fine  intelligence ;  a  man  who,  in  fact, 
gave  to  his  little  tent  in  the  mosquito 
swamp  the  atmosphere  of  one  of  the  capi- 
tals of  Europe.  Fortunately,  they  all 
spoke  French,  as  Gondolfi,  the  camp  mas- 
ter, spoke  no  English. 

Another  interesting  member  of  the  flot- 
sam and  jetsam  of  our  life  there  was  Al- 
phonse  Laurent,  a  Frenchman  of  good 
family  who  had  been  concerned  too  inti- 
mately in  some  Royalist  plot  and  had 
left  France  from  necessity.  He  had 
served  on  the  staff  of  a  Russian  general  in 
the  Russo-Turkish  War,  had  been  con- 
cerned 


xlij 

cerned  in  a  revolution  in  Hayti,  and  had 
lost  all  he  had  of  worldly  goods  at  Pan- 
ama—for be  it  known  that  Laurent  was 
honest  and  generous,  and  Panama  in  those 
days  was  no  place  for  a  man  with  these 
qualities.  He  was  our  chief  accountant 
until  his  besetting  sin,  over-drinking,  so 
mixed  his  head  on  figures  that  we  had  to 
put  him  at  other  work.  It  was  while  he 
was  chief  accountant,  however,  that  the 
incident  always  afterwards  referred  to  as 
H 's  suicide  happened. 

H was  clerk  in  the  office ;  he  was  a 

Colombian  of  nearly  pure  Spanish  ances- 
try, well  connected  locally,  and  had  mar- 
ried the  daughter  of  a  distinguished  Co- 
lombian. It  was  not  for  these  reasons 
solely,  however,  that  Laurent  gently  for- 
gave many  of  the  lapses  which  occurred 

owing  to  H 's  overfondness  for  the 

sparkling  wines  of  France  when  his 
pockets  were  full,  and  the  more  cheaply 
effective  white  rum  from  the  local  stills 
when  his  purse  was  slim.  Laurent's  heart 
was  big,  and  his  own  slender  purse  was 
always  open  to  help  those  of  his  staff  in 
trouble.  Maybe,  too,  the  knowledge  of 

his 


xliij 

his  own  growing  weakness  made  him  re- 
main H 's  friend  when  his  own  peo- 
ple had  refused  him  further  aid  and  only 
Laurent's  friendly  excuses  kept  him  in  his 

job.     H was  being  given  one  last 

trial— positively  the  last,  I  had  told  Lau- 
rent. One  night  late,  as  I  sat  idly  watch- 
ing the  sea  breaking  on  the  shore  at  the 
foot  of  the  little  cocoanut  palm  grove  be- 
hind my  house  just  outside  of  the  city 
walls,  I  heard  the  clatter  of  the  unshod 
hoofs  of  a  pony  coming  down  the  road, — 
the  little  South  American  ponies,  with 
their  quick,  short,  single-foot  gait,  make 
a  curious  snappy  sound  that  we  never  hear 
in  the  North,— and  shortly  came  Laurent, 
a  picturesque  sight  with  his  big  white  hel- 
met and  boots  and  spurs  (all  of  which 
seemed  many  sizes  too  big  for  him),  has- 
tily put  on  over  grandly  striped  pajamas. 
It  would  not  be  right  to  disguise  the  truth. 
Laurent  was  certainly  drunk— but  drunk, 
as  he  would  have  said,  as  a  gentleman  of 
France  should  be— that  is,  he  was  still 
able  to  talk  and  to  show  that  gentle  po- 
liteness that  never  left  him. 

Laurent,  when  sober,  could  talk  equally 

well 


xliiij 

well  in  either  French,  Spanish,  or  Eng- 
lish. When  drunk  he  showed  a  gentle- 
manly impartiality  and  used  them  in  a 
confusing  fashion.  He  did  not  get  off  his 
horse,  but  sat  somewhat  unsteadily;  the 
horse,  owing  to  the  discomfort  of  a  ner- 
vously swinging  pair  of  legs  equipped 
with  Spanish  spurs,  partook  of  the  rider's 
nervousness. 

His  story  was  more  or  less  as  follows : 
"Oh,  Mr.  Hart,  it  is  the  dreadful  that  has 
happened!  You  know  me,  Sefior.  It  is 
I,  Laurent,  after  my  little  dinner,  I  sit  by 

heart  and  done  for  that  H (Achl 

that  canaille!)  more  than  a  brother 
could,  and  now  what  is  that' he  has  done? 
I,  Laurent,  after  my  little  dinner,  I  sit  by 
my  table  and  take  my  cafe  and  perhaps 
one  petit  verre — peut-etre  more,  not 
much,  monsieur,  but  then,  this  country, 
Sefior,  and  what  can  one  do?  And  then 

comes  that  H ,  his  eyes  like  coals  of 

fire  and  his  voice  like  the  dead  calling, 
and  he  say  to  me,  'Laurent,  all  is  over— I 
can  live  no  more;  I  have  my  wife's  ring 
taken  and  have  used  it  for  drink.  I  must 
die.  Laurent,  I  come  to  you— you  have 

been 


xlv 

been  my  friend— you  will  shoot  me.  It 
is  bestl'  So,  Senor,  I  look  at  him— I  say 
to  myself,  'You  coward !  you  will  not  shoot 
yourself,  and  if  you  do  the  better  for  your 

family'— and  I  say,  (H ,  you  pig,  I 

will  not  shoot  you.  I  have  done  much — 
too  much  for  you,  but  this  I  will  not  do. 
But  you  can  shoot  yourself,'  and  I  handed 
him  my  pistol.  And  that  pig,  Sefior,  he 
turned  the  pistol  towards  himself,  and  I 

cry  out,  'No,  H ,  not  here !    You  shall 

not  a  mess  make  of  my  house !'  and  I  show 
him  the  door,  and  I  say,  'Now  shoot!'  and 
I  go  back  for  another  little  glass— for 
that  man  he  have  shook  my  nerves.  And 
I  wait  for  the  shot,  but  none  comes.  Then, 
ah!  what  do  I  hear,  Senor?— it  is  that  dog 

of  an  H running,  running  fast  as  his 

legs  can  carry  him,  and  with  my  pistol, 
Monsieur!  I  saddle  the  pony,  but  not  so 
quickly  enough,  for  I  follow  too  late,  he 
gets  to  that  saloon,  el  Polo  Norte,  and  he 
has  sold  my  pistol  and  they  have  given 
him  the— oh,  so  many  bottles  for  it— and, 
Monsieur,  it  is  not  right — I  am  always 
his  one  friend!"  And  poor  Laurent  wept 
real  tears. 

But 


xlvi 

But  I  am  takjng  too  much  time  with 
things  that  in  their  local  setting  had  more 
of  interest  than  they  have  in  my  clumsy 
telling. 

A  tale  of  the  Spanish  Main  without  a 
flavor  of  a  revolution  would  be  looked  at 
with  suspicion  as  to  its  genuineness.  For 
commercial  reasons  I  wish  I  could  tell 
you  that  my  experiences  did  not  include 
any  connection  with  armed  political  dis- 
turbances. 'Unhappily,  however,  it  was 
the  misfortune  of  the  companies  I  repre- 
sented to  be  interested  one  way  or  another 
in  the  fighting  zone  during  three  years  of 
revolution  in  Colombia.  Many  of  our 
native  employees  lost  their  lives  even 
while  in  our  service,  and  the  property 
loss  went  into  the  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  dollars. 

There  is  often  much  of  the  opera  bouffe 
about  these  South  American  revolutions, 
but  it  is  not  always  so ;  and  when  one  sees 
the  suffering,  starvation,  and  sickness  at 
close  range,  the  grim  wickedness  and  cru- 
elty of  it  all  sicken  and  madden  one  to  an 
extent  that  cannot  be  explained. 

In  general,  the  bulk  of  the  soldiers  on 

each 


xlvij 

each  side  are  harmless,  peaceful  Indians 
and  half-breeds,  with  no  real  interest  in, 
or  knowledge  of,  what  they  are  fighting 
about.  Rarely  is  any  great  moral  prin- 
"ciple  or  question  of  right  involved,  ex- 
cept upon  paper.  More  often  it  is  the 
greed  for  money  and  power  by  a  few  rival 
leaders  or  factions. 

To  tell  you  of  the  rows  of  peasants  I 
have  seen  brought  in,  tied  in  columns  by 
ropes,  and  enlisted  the  next  day  as  vol- 
unteers; to  tell  you  of  the  boys  in  their 
early  teens  made  to  shoulder  a  musket 
and  march  off  to  almost  certain  death  in 
marshy  jungles,  would  take  too  much 
time  and  serve  no  purpose.  We  trans- 
ported over  our  road  one  regiment,  many 
boys  too  young  to  bear  the  weights  they 
had  to  carry,  and  in  eight  weeks  brought 
back  the  same  regiment  with  not  one 
quarter  still  living— and  even  then  we 
had  to  stop  the  train  to  remove  those  who 
had  died  in  transit  before  taking  the  troop 
cars  into  the  city.  It  will  be  enough  to 
tell  you  of  one  naval  engagement  on  the 
Magdalena  River  in  which  our  own  boats 
were  part  of  both  engaging  fleets. 

The 


xlviij 

The  natural  aim  of  any  band  of  insur- 
rectionists in  Colombia  is  either  to  con- 
trol or  to  interrupt  the  lines  of  communi- 
cation between  the  coast  and  the  interior, 
by  seizing  the  railways  connecting  the 
river  with  the  coast  harbors,  or,  more 
effectually,  by  controlling  the  river  Mag- 
dalena  itself.  The  rebellion  of  which  I 
am  speaking  was  intended  to  be  inaugu- 
rated by  the  sudden  and  complete  capture 
of  all  river  craft.  At  nightfall  on  a  cer- 
tain day  bands  of  rebels  by  concerted 
action  seized  several  of  our  boats  which 
had  been  taking  in  cargo  at  our  river  ter- 
minus, Calamar,  and  at  the  same  time 
another  band  attempted  to  take  quite  a 
fleet  of  boats  at  Barranquilla,  near  the 
mouth  of  the  river.  At  the  latter  place, 
however,  the  government  at  the  time  had 
the  only  river  war-vessel  it  owned,  a 
staunchly  built  steel  boat  with  bows  spe- 
cially fitted  for  ramming,  and  with  a 
machine-gun  mounted  in  a  protected 
tower  on  the  upper  deck.  This  boat  the 
rebels  were  unable  to  seize,  and,  their 
attempt  being  known,  they  got  away  with 
a  few  of  the  Barranquilla  boats  only. 

Those 


xlviiij 

Those  they  did  seize  started  up  the  river 
to  join  the  Calamar  flotilla.  The  process 
of  seizure  was  to  go  on  board,  order  off 
at  the  point  of  the  revolver  such  men  as 
they  did  not  want  or  need,  and  force  those 
they  did  need  to  perform  their  duties  with 
a  man  by  their  sides  with  a  revolver  con- 
veniently aimed  at  their  heads.  As  a 
method  of  retaining  officers  and  crews 
this  was  generally  effective.  The  night 
was  pitch  dark;  the  first  boat  arriving 
from  Barranquilla  brought  the  news  of 
the  half  failure  at  that  port,  and  the  com- 
bined fleet  made  ready  for  action,  being 
sure  that  the  government,  with  the  "Her- 
cules," the  boat  with  the  machine-gun, 
and  other  boats  with  the  Barranquilla 
garrison  on  board,  would  be  not  far  be- 
hind their  own  boats. 

It  happened  that  the  rebels  had  taken 
at  Barranquilla  one  of  the  few  remaining 
wooden  boats  on  the  river,  the  old  "Co- 
lon," a  boat  not  unlike  the  "Hercules"  in 
appearance,  but  much  slower  and  exceed- 
ing rotten.  The  result  was  that  the  gov- 
ernment fleet  of  perhaps  four  boats,  in 
spite  of  its  later  start,  caught  up  with  the 

"Colon" 


1 

"Colon"  just  as  she  joined  the  other  rebel 
craft. 

Among  our  boats  taken  was  one  of 
our  fastest  and  best,  the  "Helena,"  of 
some  four  hundred  tons,  on  which  we  had 
one  of  the  best  pilots  on  the  river,  a  pure- 
blooded  Indian  and  a  fine  man,  liked  and 
respected  by  every  one  of  us.  With  him 
was  his  young  son,  a  lad  of  about  sixteen. 
With  the  rebel  commander  standing  by 
his  side,  poor  Vargas  was  forced  to  steer 
the  "Helena,"  the  pride  of  his  heart,  into 
the  thick  of  the  engagement.  Picture  to 
yourselves  a  dark  tropical  night,  a  deep 
muddy  river  rapidly  flowing  and  about  a 
mile  wide,  seven  or  eight  steamboats  un- 
lighted  except  for  the  glow  from  their 
furnaces,  the  sparks  from  their  double 
funnels,  and  the  continuous  flashes  from 
rifles  fired  by  hundreds  of  men  crouched 
behind  piles  of  firewood,  hastily  con- 
structed walls  of  tobacco  bales  or  bags  of 
coffee,  and  from  the  cabin  windows.  It  is 
to  be  feared  that  in  the  darkness  friends 
and  foes  lost  their  identity,  and  God  alone 
knows  whence  came  the  bullets  that  sent 
many  a  man  to  his  death  that  night.  Sud- 
denly 


li 

denly  on  the  "Helena"  the  commander 
called  to  Vargas,  "There  is  the  'Hercules,' 
you  must  ram  her  and  sink  her."  In  vain 
Vargas  protested  that  the  boat  pointed  out 
was  not  the  "Hercules,"  but  was  the 
rebels'  own  boat,  the  "Colon."  With  an 
oath,  the  rebel  commander  put  the  muz- 
zle of  his  pistol  against  poor  Juan's  head, 
and,  calling  him  a  liar  and  a  vile  name, 
ordered  him  to  steer  for  what  he  believed 
to  be  the  armed  "Hercules,"  but  what  was 
in  reality  the  "Colon."  As  the  steel  bow 
of  the  "Helena"  crashed  into  the  rotten 
old  wooden  hull  of  the  "Colon,"  and  the 
rebel  commander  realized  his  mistake,  he 
pulled  the  trigger  of  his  pistol  and  our 
good,  faithful  old  pilot  died  with  his 
hands  on  the  wheel. 

The  "Colon"  sank  like  a  shot,  and  down 
the  river  whirled  its  wreckage  and  the 
bodies  of  some  two  or  three  hundred  men 
to  be  washed  out  to  sea.  Altogether,  that 
night,  some  four  hundred  men  lost  their 
lives.  The  "Helena"  was  badly  damaged 
below  the  water-line,  and  riddled  with 
bullet-holes  in  all  her  wooden  upper 
works. 

After 


After  the  impact  with  the  "Colon," 
when  his  father  was  shot,  young  Vargas, 
who  by  his  father's  orders  had  been  lying 
on  his  stomach  back  of  the  wheel  in  the 
pilot-house,  got  up,  took  the  wheel,  and 
safely  beached  the  boat  in  shallow  water. 
From  there  he  stole  ashore,  and  days 
afterwards,  a  gaunt  and  half-starved  lad, 
he  found  his  way  to  our  office  at  Carta- 
gena and  told  his  tale. 

Even  the  periods  of  domestic  peace  in 
Colombia  were  not  without  occasional 
days  or  weeks  of  anxiety.  Colombia, 
small  as  is  its  importance  among  the  na- 
tions, has  had  its  full  share  of  troubles 
with  not  only  its  near  neighbors  but  with 
the  European  powers. 

Threatened  invasions  on  the  Venezue- 
lan or  Ecuadorian  frontiers  were  matters 
of  some  interest  but  of  no  distress  to  us  at 
Cartagena;  but  the  threatened  approach 
of  five  Italian  war-ships  to  enforce  the  set- 
tlement of  the  so-called  Cerruti  claims 
against  Colombia  gave  both  the  govern- 
ment and  the  railway  officials  much  anx- 
iety. I  was  out  of  Colombia  at  the  time, 
and  telegraphic  communication  with 

Cartagena 


Hij 

Cartagena,  as  often  happened,  was  sus- 
pended through  temporary  trouble  on  the 
land  lines.  I  had  learned  by  a  cablegram 
from  Caracas  that  the  Italian  fleet,  then  at 
La  Guayra,  was  under  orders  to  proceed 
to  Cartagena  and  there  to  seize  the  cus- 
tom-house and  collect  the  duties  until  the 
adjudicated  claim  of  Cerruti  was  paid. 
By  a  happy  chance  it  was  possible  to  send 
a  cablegram  to  Jamaica  to  catch  a  steam- 
ship sailing  that  day  for  Cartagena,  and 
due  there  a  full  twenty-four  hours  before 
the  arrival  of  the  Italian  fleet.  This  mes- 
sage not  only  warned  the  railway  people, 
but  conveyed  to  the  Colombian  Govern- 
ment the  suggestion  that  the  Italian 
admiral  be  promptly  advised  that  the 
custom-house,  located  on  the  railway  pier, 
was  the  property  of  an  American  com- 
pany, and  that  a  five  per  cent,  lien  on  the 
duties  collected  was  pledged  as  security 
for  certain  bonds  held  by  citizens  of  the 
United  States. 

Advices  reaching  the  State  Department 
in  Washington  and  the  Italian  Embassy 
to  the  same  effect,  an  entertaining  inter- 
national complication  was  created.  Our 

efforts 


liiij 

efforts  to  preserve  both  our  own  interests 
and  the  dignity  of  Colombia  were  further 
helped  when  the  flag-ship  of  the  Italian 
fleet  ran  aground  at  Boca  Chica,  the  en- 
trance to  Cartagena  harbor,  delaying  the 
actual  entry  of  the  fleet  for  three  days. 
This  accident  not  only  took  away  from  the 
effectiveness  and  dignity  of  the  naval 
demonstration,  but  delayed  the  delivery 
of  the  belligerent  ultimatum  brought  by 
the  Italian  admiral  until  the  joint  efforts 
of  all  interested  had  paved  the  way  for  a 
less  drastic  settlement  of  the  difficulty. 

It  was  during  this  period,  if  I  remem- 
ber rightly,  that  the  "Incident  of  Her 
Majesty's  Dispatch  Bag,"  as  we  after- 
wards called  it,  occurred.  Mr.  M — — 
V was  then  either  secretary  or  min- 
ister at  Bogota,  and,  having  dispatches  of 
unusual  importance  for  the  Foreign  Of- 
fice, he  used  the  good  offices  of  our  river 
steamboats  and  railway  service  as  a  pri- 
vate conveyance  for  the  Legation  dis- 
patches. 

Simultaneously  with  the  arrival  of  the 
bag  supposed  to  contain  the  advices  of 
particular  importance  came  a  telegram 

from 


Iv 

from  V ,  marked  "urgent"  and  beg- 
ging us  to  use  all  means  in  our  power  to 
catch  that  bag  and  detain  it,  as  through 
some  mistake  it  contained  not  the  dis- 
patches, but  his  soiled  shirts  and  collars! 

Downing  Street  narrowly  escaped  a 
surprise,  but  I  venture  to  believe  that  it 
would  not  have  been  the  only  soiled  linen 
in  the  archives  of  the  Foreign  Office. 

From  the  veranda  at  the  back  of  my 
house  on  the  shore,  outside  the  walls  of 
Cartagena,  a  path  led  through  a  small 
grove  of  cocoanut  palms  down  to  the  sea. 

Early  one  morning,  as  I  was  taking  cof- 
fee on  the  veranda,  a  motley  group  of 
bearded  men,  some  with  fur-banded  hats 
and  all  wearing  the  heavy  clothing  of  a 
cold  climate,  came  up  the  path  towards 
me.  Even  in  a  country  where  the  unex- 
pected is  the  likely  thing  to  happen,  one  is 
hardly  prepared  to  find  in  one's  back 
yard,  so  to  speak,  a  body  of  some  ten  or 
twelve  wool-and-fur-wrapped,  bearded 
Russians  washed  up  apparently  by  the 
breaking  surf. 

The  facts  were  no  less  startling  than  the 
surprise. 

The 


Ivi 

The  Russian  barque  "Rota,"  with  a 
cargo  of  fuel  from  Cardiff  for  the  railway 
and  actually  consigned  to  me,  had,  in 
thick  weather,  run  upon  a  reef  and  been 
abandoned  some  forty  miles  to  the  east- 
ward of  Cartagena.  The  master  and 
crew,  in  two  boats,  had  rowed  themselves 
westward  until,  cheered  by  the  sight  of 
the  morning  light  on  the  domes  and  tow- 
ers of  Cartagena,  they  had  pulled  up  their 
boats  at  the  first  good  landing  place  near 
the  city,  and  by  an  extraordinary  coinci- 
dence which  sometimes  occurs  they  had 
beached  their  boats  near  enough  to  my 
house  to  make  it  their  first  place  of  call 
for  help. 

With  the  exception  of  the  master,  they 
spoke  Russian  only,  and  he  a  little  Ger- 
man. 

With  cotton  suits  and  straw  hats  from 
the  railway  commissary,  they  made  a  less 
bizarre  appearance,  but  I  was  heartily 
glad  when,  in  the  absence  of  any  Russian 
consul,  I  persuaded  the  French  consul  to 
arrange  their  passage  to  Europe. 

Among  the  people  one  came  to  know 
well,  both  natives  and  foreigners,  were 

many 


Ivij 

many  fine  men— men  of  education,  cour- 
age, and  ability,  who  were  filling  well 
places  of  usefulness  in  the  world. 

There  were,  however,  many  men  (and 
these  chiefly  among  the  foreigners)  of  the 
adventurer  type,  either  seeking  temporary 
refuge  along  ftie  coast  or  looking  unceas- 
ingly for  that  opportunity  which  neither 
continuous  disappointment  nor  years  of 
wandering  had  made  them  give  up  the 
certainty  of  ultimately  finding. 

There  was  the  tall,  lanky  Confederate 
soldier  from  Mississippi  who,  drifting 
southward,  had  held  a  commission  with 
one  side  or  the  other  in  almost  every  in- 
surrection south  of  the  Rio  Grande  dur- 
ing the  last  twenty-five  years. 

Well  over  six  feet,  erect  in  bearing,  but 
over-angular,  his  profession  of  soldier 
was  guaranteed  by  a  large  white  military 
helmet,  which  was  made  of  tin  plate 
glaringly  whitened  with  enamel  paint. 
This  helmet  was  a  constant  wonder  and 
delight  to  us.  When  taken  off  with  the 
easy  grace  of  a  courtier  and  placed  on  a 
veranda  table,  it  gave  forth  to  us  a  sound 
of  falling  kitchen-plates,  while  to  him  I 

have 


Iviij 

have  no  doubt  it  was  as  the  clashing  of 
armor.  He  was  a  picturesque,  if  only  oc- 
casional, addition  to  our  little  coast  colony 
—this  Knight  of  La  Mancha. 

Then  there  was  the  more  courageous 
but  less  honorable  gentleman  from  New 
York  who  came  to  Cartagena  and  char- 
tered, from  its  agents,  a  little  ocean-going 
steamship,  ostensibly  for  trading  in  cocoa- 
nuts  with  the  San  Bias  Indians. 

After  one  voyage  in  its  legitimate  trade, 
having  departed  with  no  bills  paid,  the 
vessel  never  returned. 

For  years  its  rusty  plates  would  not 
have  held  together  but  for  the  barnacles 
on  its  bottom ;  but,  even  so,  it  was  not  the 
graves  of  the  more  doughty  galleons 
which  had  called  the  vessel,  as  months 
afterwards  we  learned  that  with  new 
paint,  a  new  name,  and  apocryphal  papers 
she  had  been  sold  for  cash  by  the  charterer 
at  a  port  so  distant  that  we  wondered  by 
grace  of  what  dispensation  she  had  trav- 
elled so  far. 

We  counted  as  neighbors  those  on  the 
coast  or  on  the  islands,  if  one  or  two  days' 
sail  on  the  regular  liners  or  tramp  ships 

would 


Iviiij 

would  permit  an  occasional  exchange  of 
visits. 

In  this  way  I  knew  many  in  the  foreign 
colonies  at  Santa  Marta,  Barranquilla, 
Colon,  and  Limon,  as  well  as  my  numer- 
ous friends  in  Jamaica  and  at  the  more 
distant  ports  of  La  Guayra,  Curasao,  and 
other  places. 

It  was  at  one  of  these  ports— I  will  not 
give  its  name— that  I  had  the  interesting 
experience  of  nearly  witnessing  a  duel.  I 
had  arrived  before  breakfast,  and  was  to 
leave  about  midnight  on  the  same  ship. 
Going  up  at  once  to  breakfast  with  my 
friend,  the  manager  of  the  railroad,  I 
found  with  him  another  friend,  a  Ger- 
man, the  agent  of  one  of  the  steamship 
lines.  My  host  was  an  Englishman,  and 
not  only  manager  of  the  railroad  but 
owner  of  several  fruit  plantations  up  the 
line,  and  a  man  I  had  always  liked,  and 
after  this  day  liked  the  more. 

The  German  had  seen  military  service, 
and  was  a  vigorous  defender  of  the  Ger- 
man military  idea— in  particular,  its  code 
of  honor. 

The  Englishman  had  been  having  a 

dispute 


Ix 

dispute  with  a  native  landowner  called 
(we  will  say)  Salcedo,  over  certain  boun- 
dary rights  which  affected  them  both  as 
neighboring  landowners,  and  the  dispute 
had  reached  a  point  where  ugly  words 
had  passed  between  them.  While  we 
were  at  breakfast  a  General  V was  an- 
nounced, who  in  terms  of  the  most  perfect 
politeness  gracefully  explained  that  his 
friend  Senor  Salcedo  had  been  insulted, 
and  that  unless  my  friend  showed  that 
gentlemanly  and  fair  spirit  which  he,  the 
general,  felt  sure  would  animate  him,  and 
apologize  to  Senor  Salcedo  for  the  unfor- 
tunate accusations  made,  it  would  be  the 

unhappy  duty  of  General  V (a  duty 

which  he  would  perform  with  a  thousand 
regrets)  to  ask  that  a  friend  be  named  to 
settle  the  details  of  the  meeting  which,  for 
two  such  brave  but  misguided  men,  would 
be  inevitable. 

The  German,  getting  the  scent  of  an 
affair  so  after  his  own  heart,  could  hardly 
be  restrained  from  announcing  himself  as 
the  needed  friend  and  taking  charge  of 
the  matter  at  once.  The  Englishman, 
however,  without  more  interruption  to  his 

breakfast 


Ixi 

breakfast  than  the  barest  courtesy  to  Gen- 
eral V required,  told  the  German  to 

keep  quiet,  and  then  turned  to  the  general 
with  the  information  that  Salcedo  was  an 
ass,  that  the  days  of  duelling  were  over, 
and  that  if  he  heard  any  more  such  silly 
talk  he  would  give  himself  the  pleasure, 
and  do  Salcedo  the  honor,  of  attending 
him  at  his  house  with  a  horsewhip.  After 

the  indignant  exit  of  General  V the 

real  row  began.  The  German  exploded ; 
practically  told  the  Englishman  he  was  no 
gentleman;  included  me  in  his  excom- 
munication because  I  disagreed  with  him ; 
and  for  a  few  minutes  it  looked  as  though 
some  of  us  would  have  to  fight  a  duel  to 
keep  the  peace. 

As  our  dispute  was  reaching  the  more 
gentle  ground  of  an  academic  discussion, 

the  portly  figure  of  General  V again 

crossed  the  patio,  and  with  the  dignity  of 
an  ambassador,  but  with  some  flashing  of 
the  eyes  and  much  suppressed  emotion, 
he  stated  that  unless  Senor  Salcedo  re- 
ceived within  the  hour  an  apology 
or  the  acceptance  of  his  challenge,  he, 
Senor  Salcedo,  would  reserve  to  him- 
self 


Ixij 

self  the  right  to  shoot  the  Englishman  at 
sight. 

Our  host  looked  at  his  watch,  politely 
dismissed  the  general,  and  we  continued 
our  own  quarrel,  to  which  both  fuel  and 
zest  had  been  added.  At  the  end  of  the 
hour,  together  we  walked  down  the  road 
towards  the  steamship  pier.  About  half- 
way there  we  passed  Salcedo's  house  and 
saw  him  through  the  chinks  in  the 
veranda  jalousies.  The  Englishman 
abruptly  left  us,  lighted  a  cigarette  di- 
rectly below  Salcedo's  balcony,  put  his 
hands  in  his  pockets,  and  walked  non- 
chalantly up  and  down. 

Nothing  happened!  No  shots  were 
fired.  The  German  was  furious. 

"The  Englishman  is  brave,  but  an  ass," 
he  said.  "They  all  are.  The  other  chap 
is  a  coward,  but  he  might  have  been 
enough  of  a  sneak  to  have  really  shot." 
Then  abruptly  leaving  us,  as  the  English- 
man and  I  started  down  the  road,  he 
walked  up  on  to  the  veranda,  spat  on  the 
floor  in  front  of  Salcedo,  pulled  his  nose, 
and  said  in  Spanish,  "Now  send  your 
friend  to  see  me" 

When 


Ixiij 

When  our  blood-thirsty  German  met  us 
for  dinner  that  night  the  details  of  the 
"affair  of  honor"  had  been  arranged.  It 
was  to  take  place  at  daybreak  the  next 
morning,  on  the  beach  beyond  the  light- 
house point.  Unless  the  German  showed 
pity,  it  would  be  murder,  as  he  could 
shoot  like  a  frontiersman;  but  both  in- 
clination and  business  expediency  would 
be  likely,  on  his  part,  to  make  the  affair 
more  humorous  than  fatal. 

A  little  before  midnight  the  two  men 
saw  me  aboard  my  ship,  and  with  their 
promises  of  early  advices  of  the  duelling 
I  had  reluctantly  to  leave  the  port. 
Early  the  next  morning,  as  I  came  from 
my  bath  and  stopped  outside  my  state- 
room to  drink  a  cup  of  coffee  in  the  fresh 
breeze  of  the  open  side-port,  I  saw  a 
figure  hastily  disappearing  in  the  opposite 
passage.  It  was  Salcedo,  who,  the  stew- 
ard told  me,  had  quietly  come  on  board  an 
hour  before  me,  and  had  been  "sud- 
denly called  away"  (as  he  said)  "on  im- 
portant business." 

This  reminded  me  at  the  time  of  a 
quarrel  over  night  at  the  Club  Cartagena, 

between 


Ixiiij 

between  two  high  government  officials, 
both  friends  of  the  then  President  of 
Colombia,  Dr.  Nunez.  Unforgivable 
words  passed  in  the  presence  of  a  number 
of  us,  and  an  "affair"  was  arranged,  this, 
too,  to  be  at  daybreak. 

Friends  of  both,  anxious  to  avoid  not 
only  bloodshed  but  also  a  political  scan- 
dal, hastily  sought  and  awakened  Dr. 
Nunez  to  ask  if  he  would  not  do  some- 
thing to  prevent  the  duel,  which  would 
certainly  prove  to  be  "a  la  mort." 

"Certainly,"  said  the  president  "I  will 
eat  the  dead!"  And  the  old  gentleman 
went  back  to  bed. 

The  remark,  repeated  at  the  club, 
brought  so  much  ridicule  on  the  princi- 
pals that  nothing  more  was  heard  of  either 
quarrel  or  duel. 

Rafael  Nunez,  for  many  years  the  pres- 
ident of  the  Republic  of  Colombia  and 
effectually  its  dictator,  was  an  interesting 
character.  During  the  several  years  I 
lived  at  Cartagena  he  was  both  my  near 
neighbor  and  my  landlord  in  the  little 
residential  settlement  on  the  beach  outside 
the  city  walls.  By  the  exercise  of  that  sort 

of 


Ixv 

of  genius  which  is  controlled  less  by  ethics 
than  by  the  laws  of  expediency,  he  found 
himself,  at  the  end  of  a  long  civil  war  in 
1886,  the  practical  dictator  of  his  country 
and  of  the  Constitutional  Convention 
which  had  been  called. 

The  political  party  of  which  he  had 
become  leader  was  an  adroitly  formed 
coalition,  held  together  by  force  of  his 
personality,  which  left  the  irreconcilable 
ultraclericals  and  radicals  in  two  such  far 
detached  groups  that  for  nearly  ten  years, 
until  his  death,  Dr.  Nunez  was  the  abso- 
lute ruler  of  Colombia. 

His  power  was  both  impressive  and 
mysterious.  During  the  latter  years  of  his 
administration  (which  was  when  I  knew 
him)  he  lived  in  retirement  at  Cartagena, 
a  ten  days'  journey  from  Bogota,  the  seat 
of  his  government. 

Of  scholarly  habits  and  tastes,  modest 
in  his  bearing,  simple  in  his  life,  and  in  no 
sense  a  soldier,  even  in  his  isolation  he  was 
able  to  exercise  a  more  complete  mastery 
over  the  Government  and  Congress  at 
Bogota  than  any  president  of  Colombia 
before  or  since  his  time. 

It 


Ixvi 

It  was  his  misfortune  and  that  of  his 
country  that,  remarkable  as  was  his  intel- 
lectual capacity,  he  never  had  a  real  grasp 
of  the  fundamentals  of  economics.  He 
had  a  knowledge  of  all  that  was  finest  in 
the  literature  of  most  countries;  he  was 
proficient  in  practically  all  the  Continen- 
tal languages,  and  his  knowledge  of  both 
past  and  contemporaneous  political  his- 
tory all  over  the  world  was  so  complete 
that  his  brilliancy  in  conversation  was 
often  startling.  His  knowledge  of  human 
nature  and  his  rare  political  sagacity,  by 
which  he  kept  opposing  forces  so  evenly 
balanced  that  his  own  weight  was  always 
necessary,  retained  for  him  a  power  which 
would  have  been  lost  to  a  more  forceful 
but  less  adroit  man. 

Unhappily,  the  genius  of  Dr.  Nunez 
never  included  an  understanding  of  even 
the  elements  of  money  and  exchange. 
With  the  exception  of  some  small  silver 
coinage  for  use  on  the  Isthmus  of  Panama 
and  by  the  coffee-traders  on  the  Venezue- 
lan frontier,  the  money  of  the  country 
was  an  irredeemable  paper  currency 
which  bore  the  hopeful  promise  that  the 

Republic 


Ixvij 

Republic  of  Colombia  would  pay  the 
bearer  the  stated  number  of  pesos  in 
"moneda  corriente  del  pais"— that  is  to 
say,  in  current  money  of  the  country, 
which,  by  reference  to  the  code,  one  found 
to  be  precisely  the  piece  of  paper  on 
which  the  promise  was  written,— a  vicious 
circle  which  ought  to  please  the  most 
radical  advocate  of  fiat  money  fallacies. 
The  history  of  this  currency  during  the 
years  in  which  my  relations  with  it  were 
very  close  is  interesting. 

In  1891  the  exchange  rate  in  Colombia 
was  1 80.  That  is  to  say,  1.80  Colombian 
pesos  (or  dollars)  would  purchase  $1.00 
United  States  gold. 

Owing  to  reasonable  prosperity  in  the 
country  and  the  absence  of  any  important 
further  inflation  of  the  amount  of  paper 
issued  by  the  government  or  in  circula- 
tion, the  exchange  rate  for  the  next  two  or 
three  years  did  not  exceed,  say,  220.  The 
average  was  approximately  200  for  the 
two  years,  which  meant  that  in  our  rail- 
way accounts,  which  by  law  had  to  be 
kept  in  Colombian  currency,  all  gold  ex- 
penditures,—for  example,  rails,  cars, 

locomotives, 


Ixviij 

locomotives,  salaries  payable  in  United 
States  money,  and  so  on,— when  converted 
into  currency  and  entered  in  the  books, 
appeared  at  double  the  gold  values. 

With  a  fairly  constant  exchange  ratio, 
this,  of  course,  made  no  more  trouble  than 
any  ordinary  conversion  of  one  country's 
money  into  that  of  another.  From  1895 
to  1905,  however,  vast  amounts  of  cur- 
rency were  issued  to  enable  the  govern- 
ment to  pay  not  only  for  its  extravagances 
but  also  for  the  expenses  of  quelling  the 
prolonged  insurrections  which  were  in 
some  parts  of  the  country  continuous  dur- 
ing the  ten  years  after  the  death  of  Dr. 
Nunez.  Exchange  actually  reached,  at 
first  by  a  gradual  annual  increment  and 
then  by  leaps  and  bounds,  the  enormous 
rate  of  10,000.  At  times,  even  during  the 
progress  of  the  rebellion,  15,000  and 
20,000  exchange  rates  were  not  uncom- 
mon. Fancy,  if  you  please,  however,  the 
heart-breaking  grotesqueness  of  a  railway 
accountant's  books  when  he  enters  on  the 
capital  account  a  purchase  of  a  locomo- 
tive at  $10,000  gold  in  1903  as  costing  one 
million  pesos,  when  next  above  it  in  the 

account 


Ixviiij 

account  is  one  which  cost  the  same 
amount  in  gold  in  1894  and  is  entered  as 
twenty  thousand  pesos !  Accounts  became 
a  mass  of  confused,  meaningless  figures. 
The  president's  modest  salary,  when  en- 
tered on  the  books,  was  nearly  a  million 
dollars  a  year.  Prices,  I  remember, 
created  amusement  among  visiting  for- 
eigners. A  passenger  on  one  of  the 
Royal  Mail  boats  stopping  at  Cartagena 
changed  a  twenty-dollar  gold  piece  into 
Colombian  currency.  At  the  Hotel  Ame- 
ricano he  paid  $20  each  for  Havana 
cigars,  and  $240  a  bottle  for  champagne. 
In  spite  of  his  extravagance,  he  had  a 
pocketful  of  soiled  paper  money  when  he 
returned  to  his  ship. 

It  was  the  poor  man,  however— the 
peasant— who  had  the  most  acute  suffer- 
ing from  the  fall  in  value  of  the  local 
money,  and  this  fact  should  be  noted  by 
those  who  are  deceived  by  the  sophistries 
of  cheap  money  advocates. 

The  prices  of  all  imported  commodities 
—for  example,  all  clothing,  textiles,  agri- 
cultural implements,  iron  roofing,  fence 
wires,  kerosene,  and  flour— necessarily  in- 
creased 


Ixx 

creased  in  direct  proportion  to  the  rise  in 
exchange,  but  the  wages  of  the  laborer 
responded  slowly  to  the  rapidly  growing 
change  in  values,  and  for  years  remained 
far  below  the  normal  parity  with  the  new 
conditions,— in  fact,  I  think  the  agricul- 
tural laborer  of  the  interior  is  still  se- 
verely handicapped.  While  the  causes  of 
the  inflation  obviously  worked  injury 
to  the  wealthy  planters,  the  inflation 
itself  worked  greatly  to  their  profit. 
The  product  of  the  sale  of  their  coffee, 
when  converted  into  the  depreciated  cur- 
rency, gave  the  planter  a  dispropor- 
tionately large  amount  of  this  sort  of 
money  in  which  the  laborer  was  paid. 

The  situation  became  so  impossible  for 
the  railway  at  Cartagena  that  with  the 
co-operation  of  the  local  merchants  the 
railway  company  on  one  pay  day  paid  all 
its  employees  and  outstanding  accounts  in 
Colombian  silver  coin,  imported  pri- 
vately from  the  Isthmus,  at  the  same  time 
issuing  new  tariff  schedules  putting  all 
payments  to  the  railway  on  a  silver  basis. 
The  over-night  transition  from  one  basis 
of  values  to  another  was  effected  not  only 

completely, 


Ixxi 

completely,  but  with  surprisingly  little 
difficulty. 

Perhaps  the  tragic  and  the  humorous 
are  not  infrequently  close  to  each  other  in 
all  parts  of  the  world,  but  it  seemed  to  me, 
before  I  had  learned  how  wickedly  se- 
rious the  political  uprisings  often  were, 
that  the  Latin-American  countries  had 
more  than  a  normal  amount  of  the  comic 
opera  in  their  daily  doings. 

It  was  during  the  minor  insurrection 
late  in  '94,  or  early  in  '95,  that  over  our 
own  railway  telegraph  line  from  Calamar 
came  the  news  late  one  afternoon  that  a 
large  body  of  rebel  troops  were  marching 
down  the  west  bank  of  the  river.  They 
were  said  to  be  well  armed,  and  in  num- 
bers sufficient  to  subdue  easily  the  small 
garrison  there,  and  the  governor  at  Car- 
tagena was  urged  to  dispatch  a  special 
train  with  troops  to  the  immediate  relief 
of  Calamar. 

The  news  caused  the  greatest  excite- 
ment not  only  at  Cartagena  but  along  the 
whole  line  of  the  railway  between  that 
place  and  Calamar.  Our  special  trains 
were  rapidly  put  together  and  a  regiment 

of 


Ixxij 

of  government  troops  entrained  and 
started  on  their  four  hours'  journey  to 
Calamar.  Meanwhile  occasional  dis- 
patches from  Calamar  recorded  the 
movements  of  the  approaching  enemy. 
The  troops  arrived  at  Calamar  in  time  to 
give  the  necessary  relief  to  the  suffering 
town,  which  had  been  threatened  by  no 
more  serious  an  invasion  than  a  herd  of 
cattle  being  driven  from  Portreros,  near 
Mangangue,  to  the  coast  for  ultimate 
shipment  to  Cuba. 

One  evening  during  the  period  when 
guerrilla  bands  of  rebels  were  infesting 
the  territory  along  the  line  of  the  railway, 
I  remember  discussing  with  General 
Velez,  then  Secretary  of  War  of  the  De- 
partment of  Bolivar,  the  adequacy  of  the 
protection  which  the  government  pur- 
ported to  be  giving  the  railway  line  be- 
tween Cartagena  and  the  village  of 
Turbaco.  We  finally  decided  to  make  a 
personal  inspection  of  the  line,  which  we 
did  on  horseback  during  the  night 

At  one  of  the  outposts  we  were  saluted 
by  the  officer  in  command  with  an  im- 
mense, rudely  constructed  wooden  sword, 

not 


Ixxiij 

not  unlike  those  we  have  all  made  as  boys. 
That  and  some  enormous  home-made 
epaulets  were  his  insignia  of  rank,  and 
apparently  created  no  amusement  in  the 
minds  of  his  variously  armed  volunteer 
subordinates.  It  did  not  seem  possible 
that  we  were  within  the  area  of  an  actual 
war,— and  yet  a  few  nights  afterwards, 
almost  within  calling  distance  of  that  very 
outpost,  one  of  my  own  farm  boys,  bring- 
ing into  town  the  morning  milk,  was 
attacked  by  guerrillas,  and  because  he  de- 
fended his  cargo  was  badly  wounded,  his 
ears  were  cut  off,  and  he  was  otherwise 
mutilated  from  sheer  wantonness. 

The  burning  of  our  railway  bridges 
and  trestles,  the  withdrawing  of  spikes 
and  fish-plates  from  the  rails,  and  other 
attempts  to  wreck  the  trains,  particularly 
those  carrying  troops,  were  continuous. 

Our  superintendent  devised  a  rather  in- 
genious way  of  preventing  serious  acci- 
dents: In  front  of  each  locomotive  he 
would  place  from  three  to  six  empty  flat 
cars,  which  would  pick  up,  so  to  speak, 
and  absorb  whatever  particular  form  of 
disaster  had  been  planned  for  the  train 

itself 


1103 


Ixxiiij 

itself.  By  running  always  at  moderate 
speed,  this  method  proved  so  effective  that 
we  had  no  actual  disaster  except  the  ditch- 
ing of  a  considerable  number  of  flat  cars. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  AT  LOS  ANGELES. 

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